lazygal man page

This manual page explains the lazygal program. This program is a static web gallery generator written in Python.

lazygal works so: you should have an original store of files - possibly containg subdirectories (their names serving as headings if not using the album metadata feature). This is the source file hierarchy. It will never be modified by lazygal. Then, when launching:

lazygal will analyze the contents of the source hierarchy and will (re)create the target hierarchy, with all the bells and whistles defined by the templates. Only missing parts or parts that are not up to date will be generated. There is a limitation to this mechanism though: although updates in the source directory, in the metadata or in the themes are detected, changes in command line options and configuration files since last generation are not and the user should manually delete files that need to be generated again.

Specify a file pattern (or name) which should be ignored during cleanup of the destination. May be specified more than once. Values given here will be in addition to those specified in configuration files.

Size of images, define as name=xxy, ..., eg. small=800x600,medium=1024x768. The special dimensions 0x0 use original size. Refer to the IMAGE RESIZE Description section for more information on the available syntax.

Do not copy original photos in output directory, instead create symlinks to their original locations. This is useful when you plan transferring the whole directory which lazygal generated to some other location, perhaps with rsync, and you wish to avoid creating an extra copy of each photo.

CautionThis option is not available on Windows; if you try to use it on that operating system, lazygal will immediately exit with an exit status of 1.

If set, lazygal will only export the pictures that have one of their (IPTC) tags matching TAG. It is also possible to use an equivalent of AND and OR boolean tests to filter tags. For more details, read below the section Tag Filtering.

Sort order for images in a subgallery, among 'mtime', 'filename', 'numeric', or 'exif'. (default is 'exif' which is by EXIF date if EXIF data is available, filename otherwise, sorting EXIF-less images before). 'numeric' does a numeric sort on the numeric part of the filename. Add ':reverse' to reverse the sort order (e.g. --pic-sort-by=mtime:reverse).

Sort order for subgalleries, among 'exif' (EXIF date of the latest picture in sub-gallery), 'mtime', 'dirname', or 'numeric' (default is 'dirname'). 'numeric' does a numeric sort on the numeric part of the dirname. Add ':reverse' to reverse the sort order (e.g. --subgal-sort-by=dirname:reverse).

What type of web album thumbnails to generate. By default, lazygal generates the well-loved "messy" thumbnails with randomly selected pictures from the album each rotated by a random amount and pasted together. This default can also be forced by specifying 'messy' as WEBALBUMPIC_TYPE.

On the other hand, specifying 'tidy' as the value of this option forces lazygal to skip the rotations, resulting in more regularly shaped thumbnails which can also be more densely packed. This can be an advantage if not all users of your albums have huge screens :-)

Do not remove GPS data from EXIF tags. By default the location tags are removed for privacy reasons. However, there are situations when having the location data makes sense and is desired. This is mostly meant to be used with holiday photos.

The XHTML template for the directory index page (pictures and sub-galleries links).

Depending on which index file is present, the theme will be:

dirindex.thtml: fully static

one HTML page per picture, per size and one index per size, or

dynindex.thtml: dynamic

only one index per directory is to be generated.

theme/*.thtml must be valid XML. See http://genshi.edgewall.org/wiki/Documentation/xml-templates.html for syntax. Dependencies for statically included templates (i.e. with filenames not computed from variables) are automatically computed: when an included template is modified, the software will automatically figure out which pages to re-generate. Missing template files will be searched for in the default theme.

theme/SHARED_* files (common resources for the shared directory) are renamed to strip the SHARED_ prefix and:

If a directory from the source album contains a file named album_description, it is processed as a source of album metadata. The format is borrowed from another album generating tool - Matew. Each line is treated as one possible tag, unknown lines are simply ignored. Example content of this file follows:

Example 5. album_description

Album name "My album"
Album description "Description, which can be very long."
Album image identifier relative/path/to/image.jpg

Web gallery configuration file. Only the webgal and template-vars sections are red in these files. The configuration applies to the gallery representing the directory of the configuration file, and all of its sub-directories, unless another configuration file in a sub-directory overloads some of the defined configuration values. See lazygal.conf(5) for format.

Tag filtering supports regular expression matching thanks to the 're' module of Python. All the filter matchings can be indicated to lazygal by successive uses of the 'filter-by-tag' option, or by giving a coma-separated list of keywords.

We illustrate here how more elaorated tag filtering can be done.

We want to export only the images that have the tags 'lazygal' AND 'hiking'.

This manual page was written for the Debian(TM) system (but may be used by others). Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU General Public License, Version 2 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.

On Debian systems, the complete text of the GNU General Public License can be found in /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL.